Eugenie de Montijo

Eugenie de Montijo (5 May 1826-11 July 1920) was Empress Consort of France from 30 January 1853 to 11 January 1871. Eugenie was the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, and she was known for her staunch Legitimist and Catholic views.

Biography
Eugenie de Montijo was born in Granada, Spain on 5 May 1826, the daughter of Cipriano de Palafox y Portocarrero and Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick. In 1834, her mother brought Eugenie and her sisters to Paris to flee a cholera outbreak that had started at the same time as the First Carlist War. The family later returned to Spain, and Eugenie became an acquaintance of Queen Isabella II of Spain and Prime Minister Ramon Narvaez. On 12 April 1849, she attended a reception given by President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte of France at the Elysee Palace, where he tried to seduce her for her beauty. Montijo insisted that he wait for marriage, and she said that the only way to her heart was through the chapel. They married at the Tuileries Palace on 29 January 1853, but it did not take long for her husband to stray from her, as she found sex with him disgusting, and refused to allow further approaches for him after she produced an heir. Eugenie represented Napoleon whenever he travelled outside of France, countered any liberal tendencies in her husband's politics, and served as regent during the Franco-Prussian War. After the overthrow of the Second French Empire in 1871, Eugenie and Napoleon III went into exile in England, and she died in exile in Madrid in 1920 at the age of 94.